Want your photo editing programs running fast and smooth? These are the PC parts you need.

The article in the link above also claims that CPU is the single most important factor in image editing and that image editing software “takes much greater advantage of increased single-threaded performance than increased multi-threaded performance, especially beyond four cores.”

Would I see a significant difference upgrading to a Ryzen 7 CPU and buying a dedicated graphics card?

Thanks everyone for the interesting comments!
The discussion on what the future could be is very interesting. For example, I also would like to know what are the optimizations one could do at compile stage for specific cpus/gpus; I have compiled DT myself even if I’m not a programmer so maybe a short note/guidelines to be included in the online manual or even here could be interesting for me (and I guess for many others; certainly not for the majority of the users that will be however happy wit…

Many people post results comparing processing time with GPU and CPU. Increase is dramatically.

The article in the link above also claims that CPU is the single most important factor in image editing and that image editing software “takes much greater advantage of increased single-threaded performance than increased multi-threaded performance, especially beyond four cores.”

That’s nonsense. I just measured Amaze demosaic of a 80 MP file in RT:

First of all, it depends upon the distro you’re using. Make sure OpenCL is available on your distro. The dt speedup is really dramatic with it. Then, provided you’re using Rizen, the shiny new AMD’s ROCm architecture is available on your machine, which is good. So you’ll want a card that is fully supported by ROCm. RX 5XX is good for that, yet 550 is an entry-level one. Here you can find the details: https://rocm.github.io/hardware.html
You can also use AMDGPU-PRO drivers on any card newer than GCN 1.1, but I would recommend to avoid this way, for you’ve a better choice, and AMD won’t invest much time into older solution. Have fun!
UPD: and yes, make sure you’re utilizing OpenCL on your built-in GPU. It will improve performance over CPU even on that weak GPU at least about x3.